Way to specify resource's fields list in RESTful API request

Question

I have RESTful API within a web-service with some kind of resources like users, posts and so on. When I make request for list of posts (GET /posts), I want to retrieve array

Answer 1

Have been doing research into this as well and was pointed towards Facebook's GraphQL as an alternative to requesting a restful api with the fields wanted. It is still in the very early stages but seems very promising.

https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/05/01/graphql-introduction.html

EDIT: Reproduced from the URL:

A GraphQL query is a string interpreted by a server that returns data in a specified format. Here is an example query:

{
  user(id: 3500401) {
    id,
    name,
    isViewerFriend,
    profilePicture(size: 50)  {
      uri,
      width,
      height
    }
  }
}

(Note: this syntax is slightly different from previous GraphQL examples. We've recently been making improvements to the language.)

And here is the response to that query.

{
  "user" : {
    "id": 3500401,
    "name": "Jing Chen",
    "isViewerFriend": true,
    "profilePicture": {
      "uri": "http://someurl.cdn/pic.jpg",
      "width": 50,
      "height": 50
    }
  }
}